A Brighter Future: The Effect of Social Class on Responses to Future Debt
Publisher
PSYCHOPENCitation
Schmitt, H. J., Keefer, L. A., Sullivan, D., Stewart, S., & Young, I. F. (2020). A Brighter Future: The Effect of Social Class on Responses to Future Debt. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 8(1).Rights
© 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).Collection Information
This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu.Abstract
The present study serves as an exploratory investigation of the role of social class in responses to the threat of future debt. Previous work has shown that individuals of high and low subjective social class differ in the ways that they respond to a broad range of threats and uncertainties about the future. Across three studies, we found that lower social class individuals expect more future debt and suffer greater attendant stress than higher class individuals (Study 1). We found that experimental manipulations of debt salience increased stress for lower class and not for higher class individuals (Studies 2-3). Likewise, we found that higher class individuals experienced higher affect balance and perceptions of personal control when the possibility of future debt was made salient, specifically as a function of decreased fatalism about future debt (Study 3). These three studies reveal yet another situation in which individuals of lower and higher social class respond differently to threat, and serve as an important step toward understanding the psychological ramifications of rising debt in the United States.Note
Open access journalISSN
2195-3325EISSN
2195-3325Version
Final published versionae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.5964/jspp.v8i1.1195
Scopus Count
Collections
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).